but people who aren't blind know the real reasons why prohibition is still alive in most states:

1. Police departments make a lot of money off of arresting people and seizing assets for growing/selling MJ.

2. Prison populations are required to be kept at 90%+ occupancy, ppl dealing/possessing/growing MJ are easy targets for that.

3. Many current billionaires do not want to compete with hemp in a wide variety of fields.

Prohibition is about racism and profiting off of human suffering, plain and simple.

These are all somewhat true, but the magnitude is generally overstated by pot proponents. Hemp, for example, is legal in many countries around the world, but isn't really very popular. And while arrests for marijuana are fairly common, lengthy prison stays just for pot possession are almost nonexistent.

Here's a good book about it if you're interested in getting beyond the bipolar rhetoric and into real facts.

Launching 17 million “Rocky Mountain High” jokes, Colorado has become the first state to make the prudent choice of legalizing the consumption and sale of marijuana, thus dispensing with the charade of medical restrictions and recognizing the fact that, while some people smoke marijuana to counter the effects of chemotherapy, most people smoke marijuana to get high — and that is not the worst thing in the world.

Regardless of whether one accepts the individual-liberty case for legalizing marijuana, the consequentialist case is convincing. That is because the history of marijuana prohibition is a catalogue of unprofitable tradeoffs: billions in enforcement costs, and hundreds of thousands of arrests each year, in a fruitless attempt to control a mostly benign drug the use of which remains widespread despite our energetic attempts at prohibition. We make a lot of criminals while preventing very little crime, and do a great deal of harm in the course of trying to prevent an activity that presents little if any harm in and of itself.

Marijuana is a drug, as abusable as any intoxicant is, and its long-term use is in some people associated with undesirable effects. But its effects are relatively mild, and while nearly half of American adults have smoked marijuana, few develop habits, much less habits that are lifelong (in another context, we might write “chronic”). Compared to binge drinking or alcohol addiction, marijuana use is a minor public-health concern. All that being the case, the price of prohibition is relatively high, whether measured in police and penal expenses or in liberty lost. The popularity of marijuana may not be the most admirable social trend of our time, but it simply is not worth suppressing.
One of the worst consequences of marijuana use is the development of saucer-eyed arguments about the benefits of legalizing it. Colorado, and other states that may follow its example, should go into this with realistic expectations. If the Dutch example is any guide, then Colorado can probably expect to see higher rates of marijuana use and the use of other drugs, though not dramatically so. As with the case of Amsterdam, Colorado already is developing a marijuana-tourism industry — some hotels are considering offering designated marijuana-smoking rooms, even while smoking tobacco outdoors is banned in parts of Boulder — which brings problems of its own, among them opportunistic property crime and public intoxication. Colorado’s legal drug dealers inevitably will end up supplying black markets in neighboring prohibition states. Expected tax revenues from marijuana sales will amount to a mere three-tenths of 1 percent of the state’s budget.

The payoff is not in tax revenue gained but in losses avoided. A great many people will avoid being convicted of crimes for a relatively benign recreational indulgence — and those criminal convictions often have much more severe long-term consequences on pot-smokers’ lives than marijuana does. The business of policing covert marijuana dealers has been replaced with the relatively straightforward business of regulating them in the open. A large and fairly nasty criminal enterprise has lost its raison d’ętre, at least so far as the Colorado market is concerned.

Perhaps most important, the legalization of marijuana in Colorado — and the push for its legalization elsewhere — is a sign that Americans still recognize some limitations on the reach of the state and its stable of nannies-in-arms. The desire to discourage is all too easily transmuted into the desire to criminalize, just as the desire to encourage metastasizes into the desire to mandate. It is perhaps a little dispiriting that of all the abusive overreaches of government to choose from, it is weed that has the nation’s attention, but it is a victory nonetheless. Unfortunately, it is probably too much to hope that Colorado’s recognition of this individual liberty might inspire some popular reconsideration of other individual liberties, for instance that of a working man to decide for himself whether he wants to join a union, or for Catholic nuns to decide for themselves whether they want to purchase drugs that may work as abortifacients — higher liberties, if you will.

__________________

"I'll see you guys in New York." ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to US military personnel upon his release from US custody at Camp Bucca in Iraq during Obama's first year in office.

Is there a test for marijuana that addresses CURRENT level of use/impairment? That shows if someone is high right now?

I don't smoke, but my understanding is that test for marijuana just show positive or negative that someone HAS used it at some point recently.

Little different than being able to read a BAC, if that's the case. How do you get around that legally, if pot is not an illegal substance?

It's controversial, but the law in Colorado has a 5 nanogram limit for THC in your bloodstream while driving. From what I've read, the urine tests for THC aren't at all useful for measuring current impairment, but THC in the bloodstream does go down fairly quickly after use.

The issue is that it's still not directly proportional to impairment, so it's entirely possible that someone could get charged with a DUI after smoking the night before, but being stone cold sober in the morning. The Colorado law handles that kind of strangely in that they can charge you with DUI and use the blood test as evidence, but it's not treated as conclusive proof that you were impaired while driving.

It's controversial, but the law in Colorado has a 5 nanogram limit for THC in your bloodstream while driving. From what I've read, the urine tests for THC aren't at all useful for measuring current impairment, but THC in the bloodstream does go down fairly quickly after use.

The issue is that it's still not directly proportional to impairment, so it's entirely possible that someone could get charged with a DUI after smoking the night before, but being stone cold sober in the morning. The Colorado law handles that kind of strangely in that they can charge you with DUI and use the blood test as evidence, but it's not treated as conclusive proof that you were impaired while driving.

I'm okay with that. It's the same with alcohol. You can have alcohol in your bloodstream and not be impaired as well. As long as the police have reasonable suspicion to test you first, it's fine.

Look at the graph in the OP and you'll find your primary factor. Legalization was never popular with the mainstream until recently. It wasn't cop financing or the prison industry making it unpopular.

The democrat party, where most of the legalization sentiment has been, was too weak on more important fronts (e.g. law-and-order, the economy and foreign policy) to make it an issue, much like same sex marriage.

Republicans used any hint of softness on pot as evidence of weakness on law-and-order and moral issues, which, when you consider the legitimate weakness of democrats on these issues, was pretty effective. The economic collapse of 2007 and the difficulties in Iraq changed these dynamics.

__________________

"I'll see you guys in New York." ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to US military personnel upon his release from US custody at Camp Bucca in Iraq during Obama's first year in office.

Did I mistakenly say I was listing them in order of least to most deadly?

I guess you make zero sense then, because when a parent talks about their kids it's nearly always about their safety. But if you're one of those who cares more about the icky nature of chew over the health hazards of smoking, I won't tell you not to be irrational.

__________________"My glutes are shutting off. So I tried to activate my glutes as best I could in between, but they never stayed activated." - Tiger Woods 2/5/15